Lesley Chamberlain writes fiction and histories of ideas. Her novel Anyone's Game was published in 2012, and A Shoe Story: Van Gogh, The Philosophers and the West will be published by Harbour Books this year.

Nick Cohen is a columnist for the Observer and author of You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (Fourth Estate) and What's Left? How The Left Lost Its Way (Harper Perennial). Living With Lies, a collection of his writing for Standpoint, is available as an ebook.

Tim Congdon is director of the Institute of International Monetary Research at the University of Buckingham. He is the author of an annual study for UKIP, How much does the European Union cost?, and his Privatise The BBC, a Standpoint ebook, was published in October 2014.

Robert Conquest is a historian, poet and political philosopher. He was described at the final plenum of the Soviet Communist Party as ‘anti-Sovietchik No. 1', and is the author of the classic work The Great Terror.

John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading and an Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. His recent books include On the Meaning of Life, The Spiritual Dimension and Cartesian Reflections.

Con Coughlin is the Daily Telegraph's executive foreign editor. He is an expert on the Middle East and Islamic terrorism, and the author of Khomeini's Ghost: The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Militant Islam. His latest book is Churchill's First War: Young Winston and the Fight Against the Taliban (Macmillan).